1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates, in general, to optical systems using lenticular lens materials or sheets to produce images and packaging useful for creating images, and, more particularly, to a packaging system or arrangement and method for producing images, such as 3-dimensional, colored images, with or without motion, inside or outside of containers or packages, e.g., packaging used in retail such as bottles, Jars, cups, boxes, and the like. The invention is also suited for use in large displays (i.e., lenticular-based display systems and methods) such as those provided on large glass windows, doors, or the like such as the cooler doors of stores selling refrigerated or frozen goods and in windows of stores and restaurants.
2. Relevant Background
In the competitive packaging and retailing industries (and especially, the beverage industry), marketing professionals and designers struggle to develop the individuality of their product. Most product differentiation is accomplished with the container and its packaging. In many cases, there is little difference between the contents and quality of two competing products. The differences are often ones of consumer perception of the products, and this difference in perception is created in part by advertising and marketing and, in large part, through creative packaging that leads to product identification and differentiation by package recognition and “shelf appeal.” Studies have shown that a large percentage of purchasing decisions are made at the point of sale when a consumer is faced with numerous products arranged side-by-side and many final purchasing decisions are based on the attractiveness or distinctiveness of the packaged product or container. With this in mind, a great deal of time, effort, and money is spent on graphics, design, and presentation of the product container so that the product in its container stands out from other similar products on a shelf. For many products, the cost of packaging exceeds the cost of the actual product sold in the container or packaging.
As will be appreciated, there are significant ongoing efforts to create new and eye catching graphics in packaging to make each product appealing to consumers at the point of sale. In the packaging industry, there are a variety of techniques that can provide informational graphics as well as illustrative or “eye appeal” graphics that often include multi-color graphics or photographs. More elaborate graphics are sometimes produced with lenticular graphic labels using 3-dimensional (3D) and animation. Lenticular lens material is used in the packaging industry for creating promotional material with appealing graphics and typically involves producing a sheet of lenticular lens material made up of a layer of lenticular lenses and an interlaced image is printed on the back side of the lens layer. The lenticular lens material is then attached to a separately produced object for display.
The production of lenticular lenses is well known and described in detail in a number of U.S. patents, including U.S. Pat. No. 5,967,032 to Bravenec et al. In general, the production process includes selecting segments from visual images to create a desired visual effect and interlacing the segments (i.e., planning the layout of the numerous images). Lenticular lenses or lens sheets are then mapped to the interlaced or planned segments, and the lenticular lenses are fabricated according to this mapping. The lenticular lenses generally include a transparent web that has a flat side or layer and a side with optical ridges and grooves formed by lenticules (i.e., lenses) arranged side-by-side with the lenticules or optical ridges extending parallel to each other the length of the transparent web. To provide the unique visual effects, ink (e.g., four color ink) is applied to or printed directly on the flat side of the transparent web to form a thin ink layer, which is then viewable through the transparent web of optical ridges.
While these lenticular lens materials provide excellent visual effects, the use of adhesives and other attachment methods has not proven effective in producing high quality, long-lasting, and inexpensive plastic, glass, aluminum, and paper products. Because attaching the lenticular lens material after producing the container is inefficient and relatively expensive, the packaging industry is continually searching for methods for attaching the lenticular lens material to cups, bottles, and other containers or packages as part of the original manufacturing or packaging processes. As one example, the plastic manufacturing industry has only had limited success in overcoming the problems associated with using common lenticular lens material as part of standard plastic fabrication processes. The problems arise because plastic fabrication generally includes processes such as injection molding that involve heating raw plastic materials to a relatively high temperature (e.g., 400 to 500° F. or hotter) and then injecting the fluid plastic into a mold with the shape of the desired plastic object or by otherwise processing the molten plastic. The ink or ink layer has a chemistry that does not stay intact when the ink is heated to these high temperatures, and the image is destroyed or at least significantly altered.
Further, the use of these graphic techniques is often rejected by the retail industry due to its high cost per container. The lenticular lens labels are typically costly and are difficult to justify based on a cost-benefit analysis, e.g., the additional customer attention and increased sales are typically not offset by the reduced profit on each product sale. The challenge continues to be to create eye-catching graphics or packaging at a very low cost or even with a cost that is similar to packaging already used in present products.
There is a direct relationship in lenticular lenses between lens thicknesses and lenticules per inch (LPI) or frequency and the resulting amount and quantity of data and the overall graphic quality and effect achieved by the lenticular labels, which directly affects the label's cost and physical thickness. In other words, creating a desirable graphic is often a balancing act between adding data and increasing thickness of the lens and reducing material costs and label thicknesses. Similarly, a typical cost-cutting technique of container manufacturers is reducing the thickness or overall material used in the container and container walls. Some efforts have been made to utilize thin lens technologies to provide more data and enhanced graphics with less materials and reduced material costs, but the overall graphic effects have been only minimally successful with marginal quality and effectiveness.
In other efforts, wraparound labels have been developed that are capable of producing 2D and 3D images, e.g., images that “float” within a water or clear liquid bottle or that are visible on the back of a clear walled container when the contents have been emptied. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,943,953 to Raymond describes wraparound lenticular lenses for clear walled containers. As described, a wraparound label may be applied to a clear walled container (e.g., a water bottle) and the label includes a lenticular lens array that gets positioned on one side of the bottle while a printed image is provided on the opposite side of the bottle (e.g., is printed on the bottle outer surface or on the inner surface of the label). In this case, the lenses in the thin wraparound label focus through the container walls and through the interior space of the container. In other words, the focal length of the lens array is quite large, which allows relatively course lenses (e.g., lenticular lenses with relatively low lenticules per inch (LPI)). However, there are many packaging situations in which the contents of the container are not clear or the container walls themselves are not clear. In these situations, it is desirable to provide the printed image near the lenticular lenses such that the lenses do not have to focus through the container walls or container contents. Unfortunately, this again forces the packaging industry to face the issues involved with trying to produce eye-catching graphics with thin labels so as to avoid attaching thick and undesirable “slabs” of glass or plastic making up a thick lens on their products.
In this regard, it should be understood that lenticular graphics and printing require extreme accuracy in the printing registration and the fabrication of the lens array to produce a high quality image. Creating a quality image is much easier with a thick lens array (e.g., ⅛ inch or greater thicknesses) because the plastic or other material in the array allows the lenses of the array to focus on the backside of the lens array or layer or layer of plastic. The lens array can be course in this case such as 20 LPI which allows each frame and/or pixel in the image to be larger, thereby simplifying printing processes. However, these thick lens arrays are undesirable for a number of reasons including added material and fabrication costs, rigidness that makes it difficult to apply or “wrap” the lens array on a curved surface, and printing costs that significantly increased because the thick array does not lend itself to standard printing press processes (e.g., the interlaced image typically has to be applied via other more costly processes).
Due to the problems with thick lens material or arrays, the packaging industry continues to look for ways to utilize thinner materials that can be applied using standard processing techniques, such as those used to apply a label to a beverage bottle or other techniques now in use. For example, a standard plastic or paper label used for a glass or plastic water or beverage bottle may be only 1 to 3 mils thick (e.g., 1.35 to 2 mils is common) but can be applied to bottle very inexpensively. Thinner lenticular labels with lens on one side and an image on the other, though, have not been adopted because they are impractical in many cases as they provide very little material (e.g., plastic) for focusing when the printed image is provided on the back of the labels (e.g., printed on the back of the lens array). As a result, these lens arrays would have to be formed using very fine (or high density) lenses which causes the data space for a corresponding or registered image to be quite small causing the printing to be exponentially more difficult or nearly impossible with most existing printing equipment.
For example, a lens with a material thickness of 10 mils may need to be formed at 120 to 140 LPI to create a desirable, high quality image. This is a very fine lens array and forces very “thin” data spaces, which causes the image mathematics to be problematic. At this level, the resolution and the number of frames (e.g., for providing motion or other effects with multiple frames of a movie clip or the like) possible is also very limited (e.g., reducing quality of the produced image). For example, if it were desired to provide 20 frames of a movie clip to show action, each frame and pixel width would be about 1/2800 of an inch in the interlaced image when the lenses in the array are provided at 140 LPI. Printing this type of image is extremely difficult. To provide a lenticular lens array on one side of a standard wraparound label (e.g., a plastic label having a thickness of about 1.35 to 2 mils) and an interlaced image on the back of the label, it has been estimated that the lenses would have to be provided at 400 to 600 LPI to achieve a desired image result, which result more limited data spacing and significantly more difficult printing mathematics and other issues.
Hence, there remains a need for packaging systems and methods that allow use of lenticular lens technologies in standard containers to produce enhanced graphic effects. Preferably such systems and methods would allow thin labels, such as standard wraparound labels, and existing (or only slightly modified) bottles and other packages to be utilized to create high quality, eye catching images.